The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane (6 page)

That was what I liked best about my mother. She always spoke her mind. Not in an unpleasant way. Just in an unafraid way. It seemed to me she lived her whole life in an unafraid way, which was why it seemed so unfair that her life was cut short. Would she have lived longer if she'd been afraid? Would this have kept her from going to Zimbabwe or believing she could have a guesthouse there? Or would her short life have been just more unhappy? Clouded by fear. It bothered me more than anything else that I would never know if things would have turned out differently if we could, for instance, have gotten back my parents' lives and done them over, fixed the fatal flaws that caused them to end up on that train, riding, riding to whatever bloody, unvegetarian place they had arrived.

I wanted to be like my mother, light and open and full of graceful courage, but I think I was more like my dad, who was forthright and stand-up but also enjoyed giving someone a good poke now and then. Well, we were none of us perfect. Not even my mother, who had her own small vices. She couldn't make chocolate chip cookies without eating the entire batch. My father would come home saying the apartment smells great, what have you been making, and my mother would look around furtively and say … cookies … finally because although she was a pig when it came to cookies, she was not a liar, and my father would say, oh, fantastic, where are they, and my mother would say, none left, in a businesslike manner that hoped to cut short any further speculation about the fate of the cookies, and start to play the marimba really loud. My mother always wanted to lose ten pounds, but she never seemed to figure out that a good start would be to stop making cookies. She said, I am going to make cookies, Meline, and I am only going to eat one. It would be me who would only get one, at most two, then she'd tell me no more, they weren't good for me, and when I came in the kitchen later a terrible look would be in her eye, like a cornered fox, and I'd know the cookies had once again gotten the best of her.

In the end she came to believe that the cookies were evil. It was the only time I ever heard her call anything evil. As a rule she didn't believe in evil, but it was the only way she could account for the cookies' sway.

One day I came home from school and tried to help her overcome her struggle with the cookies with a saying my teacher had written on the board that morning:
ALWAYS PADDLE YOUR OWN CANOE
, by which I thought she could extrapolate Don't let the cookies control you. My mother sat down and thought about that, but she didn't seem to get the implication. “The one I like is
DON'T BE FURIOUS
,
BE CURIOUS
,” she said, pouring us each a glass of lemonade. I thought we were going to segue into an examinatory chat about such things, but instead she just looked off into space and sipped her lemonade and said, “Do you think that cat next door was really spayed? It looks pregnant to me.”

I tried to think of a favorite aphorism of my father's, but all I could recall him giving me in the way of organized advice was “
DON'T TAKE ANY CRAP FROM ANYBODY
.” It's not exactly something you'd want needle-pointed on a pillow.

Still, I had thought, a judicious blend of this advice would probably see me through. I had thought this on Monday still. By Tuesday I had changed my mind. Wednesday I was clinging to them again. Today I wasn't sure. Tomorrow it would probably be something else. Maybe not. I took another bite of kugel. My world was gone. My world was gone.

“Kugel? Brisket?” I said to Jocelyn. “I never even
heard
those words before.”

 

MARTEN KNOCKERS

J
OCELYN SAID
, “Mrs. Mendelbaum told me that it was what she used to cook for her family. She said she cooked good simple food, nothing fancy. She isn't a professional cook, you know. Or a professional housekeeper. She took the job because she couldn't stand listening to only her own sounds every day in her apartment. It creeped her out. I'm paraphrasing, of course. She wanted to be someplace where there were other people's sounds. You knew when you hired her that she was awfully old, didn't you, Uncle Marten?”

“I did
not!
” I said. Who thought about such things? “She doesn't look it.” There was a pause as I considered this. “
You
don't think she looks old, do you?”

“Didn't it say her age on her résumé?” asked Jocelyn, ignoring my question and continuing to calmly cut her meat into teeny, tiny bits.

“Her what? Oh yes. Those things. Well, I didn't ask for one.”

“References?” asked Jocelyn.

“No, of course not. Well, I mean she
looks
okay, doesn't she? Not like an ax murderer or anything. And, after all, if someone wants to make up a résumé and references, that's easy enough to do.”

“Yes, but you can phone the references to check them out,” said Jocelyn. “That's what they're there for. You can find out if someone is really too old to be working.”

I felt cornered and bored. It was all much ado about nothing if you asked me. “Yes, well, I suppose you can. But there's nothing to stop people from having their friends pretend to be phony references. Face it, Jocelyn, my dear, if someone in your future employ wants to hoodwink you, well, they can. So you may as well just dispose of the whole nonsense.”

“Or go with your gut,” Meline said, shoving rolls into her mouth. She had apparently given up on dinner and made rolls the main course.

“Exactly,” I said, looking at Meline gratefully. “Go with your gut. My gut says she looks perfectly okay.” I pulled my glasses down to the tip of my nose and glanced over them in the direction of the kitchen where Mrs. Mendelbaum was putting the finishing touches on a honey cake. “She looks completely capable of doing whatever a younger cook could do. Heavy lifting and such.”

“Heavy lifting?” Meline asked, laughing and spraying crumbs everywhere. Jocelyn looked politely away.

“Yes, in the kitchen. Heaving pots of pasta water or heavy roasts and turkeys about,” I said imperturbably, returning to my meal. Girls were really very silly. Anyone could see the woman could cook and that's what I hired her for, so what was all this talk of résumés and references? I wasn't hiring for NASA, after all. And how the heck was I supposed to know if someone was too old to work unless they told me so? I could rarely remember how old I myself was. The only important thing about people was their ideas, and the tragedy was that they seldom had any. “I don't even know how old
you
are,” I said, continuing aloud my train of thought.

“I'm sixteen,” said Jocelyn.

“I'm fifteen. Well, almost sixteen. Nearer to sixteen than fifteen,” Meline added. She took one foot out from under her and sat on the other one.

“Really,” said Jocelyn, “it is extraordinary how you always sit with one leg under you. Like some kind of stork. Are you
hatching
your feet?” Jocelyn placed her knife and fork together on a diagonal in the center of her plate and sat back, looking as if she were done with dinner and us as well. Meline and I looked at her in amazement. It was not like her to be so rude. Then Meline peered down at her foot as if expecting a baby bird to indeed come crawling out of it. She put both feet on the floor and seemed disturbed.

I spied Meline's plate with all its leftovers and nearly untouched brisket and said, “Aren't you hungry?”

“I had a lot of chocolate,” she said.

“Ah,” I replied happily. I was quite pleased that my solution had worked. When I had noticed the hot dog dinners were not being greeted with enthusiasm I tried to think what I could use to tempt the girls' apparently capricious appetites and remembered that a woman I had met at a conference had told me that women were crazy for chocolate. That they would do anything for the stuff. I remember standing back and looking at her searchingly, speculating on just how crazy she was. Then I promptly forgot the whole business, but with two hungry but appetiteless nieces this conversation had come back to me. What was the name of that chocolate this woman had spoken so lovingly of, oh yes, Godiva. I got on the Internet and ordered the girls each twelve boxes to be sent overnight. That should hold them. That should keep them from starving to death. I had Sam, the helicopter pilot, deliver them. He accepts all my mail and deliveries at his address in Vancouver and then drops them on the island when the mood seizes him. Sam likes being a delivery service, although he really isn't very good at it, mostly because he can only manage to drop my mail and deliveries in
roughly
the direction of the house. I never complain and, in fact, don't find my packages half the time, but then, I often don't remember ordering things, so I suppose it doesn't matter.

Anyhow, when the chocolates arrived, I could tell from the rattling sand sound in the boxes that, because of Sam, they were broken to bits. But girls weren't fussy about the shape their chocolates were in, were they? That woman at the conference made it sound as if, given a choice, they would just inject them directly into their veins anyway. I'd found one of the boxes in a rabbit hole. It was rather like an Easter egg hunt, I thought happily. I found some other things Sam had “delivered” randomly about the island as I went around hunting for the Godiva boxes, and they came as a pleasant surprise, as if they had sprung out of the earth spontaneously. The reverse of spontaneous combustion, I thought with amusement. Sometimes my own temperament and lifestyle suited me so exactly that I felt a wave of contentment wash over me. If only people would stop fussing. If they would enjoy the things that happened to them in the serendipitous way they occurred instead of worrying that they weren't happening the way they were
supposed
to happen, they'd surely be a lot more content with life. All those people I met at conferences who were always off to the gym in the hotel or doing something equally improving. Improve yourself to what end, I always wanted to know. What was it that people wanted to
be?

“Well,” I said, pleased that Meline had enjoyed her chocolates, “interesting dinner.” Forgetting that the interesting part had all been happening in my head and they hadn't been privy to it. It occurred to me again that once you started making contact with people they wanted
you
to listen to
them
and the whole thing became exhausting. Positively exhausting.

“Who wants cake?” Mrs. Mendelbaum, her mouth full of kugel, called from the kitchen, where she was eating standing up at the kitchen table while making a grocery list.

“What?” I asked. “Did you say something, Mrs. Mendelbaum?”

There was a pause while she swallowed. “I said who wants cake? A nice little piece of honey cake, maybe?”

“Are you still eating in there?” I called back.

“I shouldn't eat?”

“No, no, that's not what I meant. I keep telling you, dear lady, you don't have to eat in there like some kind of fugitive. Why will you not join us here at table? I'm sure the girls wouldn't mind.”

“Mind? What's to mind?” yelled Mrs. Mendelbaum. “Poor little things lose their parents, the only living things they have in the world, and they should care if I eat with them?”

“It would be good for them is what I meant to say. I'm no great shakes at keeping them company. A woman at the table would be … an
asset for us all.
” My voice trailed off at this last. Good manners demanded such a response that would further imprison me in intolerable company, but I choked it out in a desperate victory of principle over desire.

“A woman, why a woman? I should menstruate on them?” She was muttering to herself, unaware that we could hear her quite clearly, that poor little Jocelyn was turning red. “Now listen, Mr. Smarty Pants,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum, raising her voice so we would hear her and slapping out the “t”s in “smarty pants” in her most acid German accent, putting all her derision into that consonant, “so I read. So I know. The cook does not eat with the family. Don't think I didn't see that book you planted in the kitchen—
What Does a Butler Do?
What does a cook do, one whole chapter. What does a footman do? Who heard of such things, Mr. Fancy Pants? A cook, the book says, does not eat at table. A cook eats in the kitchen.”

“Could I
be
more welcoming?” I whispered anxiously. “It isn't I, is it, that is instigating this ridiculous argument? I could not be more democratic. Not that there is a need for it. Of course everyone should eat together. But she is going to be temperamental, after all. I hoped not—but I feared. I read about that in that very book of which she speaks. So many cooks
are
temperamental. It is, after all, called the culinary
arts.
”

“You see, you should have interviewed, and not just picked the first one that came along. You might have discovered this ahead of time,” whispered Jocelyn.

In a louder voice I called, “I swear to you, Mrs. Mendelbaum, I didn't plant a book about servants in the kitchen so that you would find out that cooks don't eat with the family. I didn't plant any books anywhere. Well, that is, I did put books about in logical places, but not with any idea that anyone but me would read them. I didn't plan to have anyone else living here. You all just … showed up.”

“Showed up, just showed up, did I?” muttered Mrs. Mendelbaum and ate a second piece of kugel, ignoring us in the dining room and finishing her list. “Crazy man.” She ate a few more bites and then shouted to the dining room, “My Mendel was a student! Educated!”

I didn't know what to make of this. We waited. It sounded like the beginning of an accusation, but nothing else was forthcoming. We sat and looked at each other around the table for a few minutes silently and then all said at the same time,
“Mendel Mendelbaum?”